Accident
by Jade Nolan
Summary: A crime scene in a building scheduled for demolition is obliterated with Mac still inside... -Mac and most of the team featured
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: **_Disclaimer - all original CSI: NY characters are owned by CBS. All others are my own creation._

_This story basically takes place in the A/U of sorts of 'Lost and Found' where Mac ends up adopting Devon. I guess I consider it an A/U as the premise of that story and this is basically in current time but obviously in a completely different direction than the show. This story occurs 2.5 years after the epilogue of 'Lost and Found'.  
_

_Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy it!  
_

* * *

**Chapter 1**

"Hey, Adam," Mac called.

"Yo, boss," Adam replied without taking his pen from his mouth and looking up from his current project.

Mac took a brief second to shoot Adam a humoring look at the casual slang of his tech's response, "Want to come process a body that was found in a building scheduled for demolition this morning?"

Adam's eyes lit up and he dropped the pen out of his mouth, catching it in one hand and almost throwing it on the table as he hurried to save the progress he'd made on the audio reconstruction he'd been working on. "Boss, you have no idea how much I'd love to get out of here right now!"

Mac smiled, "I think I have some sort of an idea," he said, having jumped at the opportunity to get out of the office as well. "You ready?"

"Yep!" Adam said. "Can I just grab my jacket real quick?"

"No, Adam, you have to deal with it if you don't have it handy. We gotta get going," Mac replied with a perfectly serious and straight face.

Adam looked suddenly crestfallen. "Oh. Okay," he said, moving a bit slower and joining Mac at the elevator.

Mac shook his head in amusement feeling like smacking Adam upside the head. "I'm kidding!" he said, "Go get your jacket. Our victim isn't exactly going anywhere."

"I knew that," Adam said with a half-nervous chuckle, "I'll be right back." He dove off down the hallway.

xxxxx

The sun was out, but the early April air was still cool, barely breaking 50 degrees. Mac adjusted his sunglasses as he stepped out of his truck, grabbing his case and looking up at the building where their dead body was currently lying. There was nothing special about it: typical run-down fourteen story New York apartment building sitting in a row of similar complexes with a scattering of bodegas, liquor stores and other rather shady looking small businesses. Adam right behind his shoulder, Mac ducked under the police tape that cordoned off the building. He registered the notice for demolition that was displayed in the front door and that was also in the adjoining apartment buildings.

"Some sort of neighborhood reconstruction project or something," a voice drawled in a very strong Brooklyn accent.

Mac looked behind him to see the scene detective duck under the tape as well to join him.

"Detective Vanessa Morrow," she introduced herself, shaking Mac's hand and gesturing up and down the street to the multiple notices.

"Detective Mac Taylor, and this is Adam Ross," Mac replied to Morrow's greeting.

"Nice to meet you," Adam said.

"Of course what they never seem to understand is that it takes more than a nice new set of buildings to change a neighborhood," Detective Morrow continued after flashing a warm smile at Adam.

"Gotta start somewhere though, right?" Mac answered in a tone that nevertheless indicated his agreement with her sentiment. This neighborhood was typical of most socio-economically depressed neighborhoods that was fairly well entrenched in its place amongst several low-level gangs. It was going to take a hell of a lot more effort and money to turn it around than just a few new buildings with shiny fronts.

Vanessa snorted.

"So fill me in," Mac said, gesturing for her to lead the way to their dead victim.

"Well, demo was scheduled for ten this morning, and when the crew were doing their final sweeps of the buildings, they found our guy. Obviously they canceled the demo and called us." Vanessa led them over to the stairs. "Electricity has already been cut," she said in response to Adam's questioning look as they walked straight past the elevators. "And it's only the second floor," she added with a wink in his direction.

Adam blushed.

"Any idea who the victim is?" Mac inquired as they climbed the steps of the cheap, concrete steel and linoleum building.

Vanessa flipped open her notebook. "Male, 21 years old, name of Wesley Parrot…"

From behind Mac, Adam burst out laughing. "No way!" he said, "Wesley Parrot? What parent names their kid 'Wesley', especially if his last name is already 'Parrot'?"

Mac just looked over his shoulder at Adam who immediately tried to straighten his face.

"Sorry, boss," he said as contritely as possible.

Mac gave him a small smile and turned his attention back to a grinning Detective Marrow.

"Hey, I had the exact same thought," she said, glancing back at Adam, "Let's see, what else…?" she turned a page in her small notebook as they reached the door to the second story and made their way down the echoing hall. "Money and cards were still in his wallet, as was a student ID for NYU."

"Obvious cause of death?" Mac asked as Vanessa ushered them into the end apartment.

"Beat with a baseball bat," she announced, offering Mac and Adam the actual crime scene with a flourish.

It seemed almost too good to be true, but sure enough, there was a baseball bat lying only a couple feet from the victim and covered in blood.

"Our killer certainly didn't go out of his way to hide his tracks all that much," Mac observed looking around.

"Nope," Vanessa said, "Even without all that fancy-shmancy CSI training I can tell that."

Mac shot her a look.

Vanessa turned to Adam. "Does he do that a lot?" she asked in a low voice.

"What?" Adam replied.

"Just look at someone like that?"

Adam nodded, "Yeah, he kinda does."

"Spooky," she said.

Adam fought to hold back laughter.

"Are you two quite finished back there?" Mac asked.

"Yes, boss," Adam said hurriedly.

"Well then get to work collecting trace and fingerprints unless you want to take the chance of having to rely on a burrito that's been sitting in an oven warmer thing for three days from the bodega on the corner for dinner."

Adam made a face. "I'd rather go back on that lemon water diet," he said.

Mac gestured to the crime scene in general and arched one eyebrow, "Then get to work."

Vanessa gave Adam a sympathetic pat on the arm before addressing Mac. "I'm going to finish interviewing people in the area," she said, voice and demeanor back to business, "Kid's obviously not from around here but maybe someone saw him. I'll be back in a little bit, catch up with anything you might have found."

"We'll be here," Mac said.

xxxx

It was a fairly straight-forward crime scene in the sense that whoever the killer was certainly hadn't tried to hide any evidence, and within two hours, Mac and Adam had pretty much the whole thing processed and Mac had a very clear picture of _what_ had gone down. Who had done it and why was still a mystery, but he no doubts there wouldn't be that much trouble tracking down their perp.

"Adam?"

Adam looked up from where he was finishing collecting a print from the inside of the apartment door handle.

"You about finished?"

Adam folded the clear sticky plastic onto itself and slipped it into a mini envelope. "Last one," he told Mac.

"Ok, start bringing the tagged evidence down. I'll be behind you in a few minutes."

Adam nodded, packed up his camera, case and filled his remaining hand with as much of their acquired evidence as he could carry including the bloody baseball bat. He passed Detective Morrow who was coming back up to the apartment on his way out and she shot him a smile that left him so distracted he nearly ran into the stairwell door. He crossed the street and put his load into the back seat of Mac's truck when someone approached him.

"Any idea when you guys are going to be done and out of there?" the man asked.

Adam looked him up and down, not especially appreciating the annoyed and peremptory tone of voice of the individual. "And uh, who are you?" he asked.

"Tom Cartwright," the man said like Adam should have already known, "The operations manager for the demolition. We're on a rather stringent timeline that is going to be hell to reschedule if we can't bring these down today."

Now Adam was definitely put off at callous and cavalier tone Cartwright spoke with. "Yeah, well, Mr. Cartwright, the victim that was in that building could barely buy his own drinks and now he's dead. We're almost finished processing," he said decidedly coolly, "But it's still an active crime scene and an open case so I can't tell you when you'll get to have your buildings back. Now if you'll excuse me…" Adam turned and finished stashing his case under the passenger seat.

The next thing he knew was the most tremendous noise and he was suddenly thrown onto the backseat and almost out the other side of the truck by the shockwave of the building behind him, exploding.

For a few seconds he had no idea where he was.

His vision winked in and out, hazy, confused.

There was no further sound except a tremendous ringing in his ears as he blinked and tried to bring the back of the seat that he was now staring at into focus.

He slowly pushed himself up as his vision and comprehension inched back.

He leaned against the outside of the truck and stared. Stared at the apartment building opposite him which was now settling heavily over the blown-out back corner. On the ground next to him was Tom Cartwright, unconscious, knocked out from his head being slammed against the bed of the truck. Adam turned his still spinning gaze back to the unsteady apartment building and the non-existent space where their crime scene had been.

Their crime scene where he had left Mac and Vanessa.

He waited, half expecting to see them stagger out the front door at any moment. But as the approaching sirens from the responding fire and police vehicles finally got close enough for his damaged hearing to detect, the front door remained stubbornly closed and unmoving.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** _I know this is a very quickly forthcoming update (especially for me!), but considering how I left the last chapter, I really wanted to get this to you guys before the holiday and I got all busy and distracted. That being said, you probably shouldn't expect chap 3 to be published with such lightening speed :D But I will get it out as soon as I can. _

_Thank you a ton for the reviews so far! And I hope you all enjoy this next installment as well :)  
_

* * *

**Chapter 2**

His head pounded furiously, and he groaned as he woke up and slowly returned to consciousness. The right side of his face felt stiff, and he tasted blood. Mac slowly opened his eyes, but he might as well have still been passed out for all the good it did him. He blinked and tried to peer through the impenetrable darkness that pressed in on him on all sides. He waited, seeing if his eyes might adjust, but not a trace of light made its way to him. The blackness was so deep it was almost tangible.

He tried to take a deep breath and move.

And the rest of the pain hit him.

Flooded him with such an all-encompassing intensity that he lost conscious thought for several seconds.

His pelvis and right leg felt completely crushed, his left arm was clearly broken, and the rubble sitting on his lower chest and abdomen was so heavy he could barely take a full breath let alone anything else. He lay there for several minutes trying to regain his orientation and achieve some level of control over the unrelenting agony that filled his body. As the edge of it slowly faded, he gingerly raised his right arm and felt the side of his head where the throbbing pounding was making even his eyes hurt. He winced as his fingers brushed a gash that extended from his temple to above his eye. Fortunately it didn't really seem to be bleeding anymore.

The cold hit him as well. He could hear water coming from one of the broken pipes in the wall, and the icy contents seeped both over and under him. He shivered as the frigid water ate mercilessly through his clothes, taking with it what little body heat he had. He wondered briefly at the fact that there was water in a building that was going to be demolished, but figured that the pipes must simply not have empty. The thought that the amount was finite was only very marginally comforting as there was still more than enough to make his position extremely uncomfortable and actually downright dangerous.

"Detective Morrow?...Vanessa?" he managed in a half-choked voice. _Goddamn, the rubble sitting on his chest and mid-section was heavy._ But Vanessa didn't answer and nothing but resounding silence, the drip of water and slow creak of the building still settling met his ears. "Vanessa?" he called again in a hoarse voice, choking back a cough at the effort.

Still nothing.

He felt as far out as he could with his right hand, but it met nothing more than the floor and empty space. Of course, he had no idea where he was anymore. Depending on how the building had collapsed, he could be anywhere from still on the second level to all the way down in the basement if the floors had given way and he had gone down with them. Just because Vanessa didn't answer him, didn't mean that she was dead. At least that's what he told himself and fervently hoped.

He raised his head to see if he could see _something_ to figure out any way to get out of where he was trapped. But everything was blackness, and nothing but immovable broken concrete and steel met his right hand as he tried to shift whatever was on top of him. Freezing water dripped off his soaked hair and down the back of his neck, chilling him even further and sending violent shivers throughout his body on top of the constant trembling of his muscles against the cold. Pain flared again at the movement and the effort of trying to free himself.

The utter helplessness of his situation crashed over him, and he tried to not think about the seriousness of the injuries that the pain tearing at his body told him he had sustained. Not to mention that hypothermia was probably going to kill him if any internal bleeding didn't.

**xxxxxxxxxx **

Jo couldn't believe the scene that met her eyes as she almost flew out of her car upon bringing it to a screeching halt. Glancing around and taking in the chaos, she spotted Mac's truck and Adam sitting on the ground leaning against it, a medic tending to him. Continuing her scan of the street she located what she presumed was going to be the command post location, but nowhere did she see Mac. Her stomach plummeting, she hurried over to Adam.

Kneeling down, she lay a hand on his shoulder, "Adam, you ok?"

He looked over at her, taking a moment to figure out what she said. "Yeah," he answered in a loud voice. He waved his hand towards his head. "Ears…" he said.

Jo nodded.

"Other than that he seems to be alright," the medic reassured her.

Jo heaved a partial sigh of relief. "Thanks," she said as the medic stood. He gave her a smile before heading off to check on someone else. Jo turned her full attention back to Adam who was staring at the partially collapsed building with a stunned look on his face. "Adam," she said loudly gently shaking his shoulder to get his attention, "Where's Mac?" Adam's eyes met hers and the sinking feeling in her stomach chilled to ice.

"He uh…he sent me out to the truck, and then," Adam gestured helplessly back to the building, "Then…"

"Adam! Where's Mac?" Jo repeated, emphasizing each word.

"He's, he's still in there," Adam said, barely above a whisper.

Jo's face blanched, and she felt dread settle in the pit of her stomach. She looked back up at the collapsed building. "Please me you're not serious."

Adam shook his head, his face every bit as stricken as Jo's. "I wish I wasn't, boss," he said.

Jo covered her mouth with hand for a brief few seconds, allowing the impact of the scene and the fact that Mac was trapped somewhere in the rubble to hit her before shoving her emotions to the back of her head and honing in on the task at hand.

"Adam, I need you to take what evidence you do have back to the lab and start working on it, see if there's something there."

Adam nodded and started collecting from the floor of the truck what little he had brought out of the crime scene before it had been obliterated.

"And where's Flack?" Jo continued. "He's on today, right?"

Adam nodded again, and pointed over his shoulder to where the rescue command was almost finished setting up.

Jo returned his nod, and squeezing his shoulder reasurringly, she him packing up his gear and hurried over to Flack.

Flack looked over at her as she approached and finished whatever heated discussion he was having with the fire chief in charge before turning his attention to her. But in that brief look, Jo read the same disbelieving fear in his eyes that was eating at her.

"What happened, Don?" Jo asked, as soon as he was free.

Flack, not speaking in an official command capacity anymore, seemed to struggle to hold himself together, he was so furious. "It seems that somehow some of the explosives in the building which were to be used to demolish it were set off, bringing that one corner completely down."

"Wait, someone deliberately set off the explosives?" Jo repeated.

"Well they don't go off without being triggered, which is why when they originally found the body and they called off the demo, Mac and Adam and the rest of our guys were cleared to go in. Supposedly if no button is pushed, no 'boom'. Which is also why we now have another problem." Flack continued, anger fairly radiating off him.

"What problem?" Jo asked, the dread in her stomach settling even harder.

"Because the detonation wasn't triggered by any of the demo crew, they're refusing to send rescue crews in there until the rest of the charges are cleared and they know no more are going to be set off."

Jo stared at Flack, stunned. "What?"

"I know," Flack said, a look of tortured helplessness stamped on his face.

"So Mac is in there somewhere, probably badly injured," _Jo refused to let herself think, 'dead',_ "And at best, trapped, and we can't even begin to look for him?"

"No," said Flack in a tortured voice. "Plus I have our detective who was on scene initially, still unaccounted for. So whatever the hell it is you guys do to figure these things out, you better do it fast."

**xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx**

Everyone minus Hawkes, who was on vacation in Portland, was waiting in the conference when Jo got back to the lab shortly after she had finished assessing the on-scene situation. Their eyes followed her as she made her way to the front of the room.

"Is it true?" Lindsey asked Jo into the silence that resounded, "They won't let any rescue effort start?"

Jo nodded, "Not until they clear every explosive set in both adjacent buildings."

"But they're what…fourteen stories each? That's going to take forever," Lindsey protested. "Why the hell…?"

Danny's face was furious. "Jo, let me go talk to the fire chief in charge. I'll convince him for you!"

Jo let a glimmer of a smile cross her lips. "As much as I appreciate the sentiment, Danny, I'm afraid that's not going to get us anywhere except you probably trying to fight a suspension based on your conversation. And as for why they won't initiate rescue," Jo continued, "Every member of the demo crew is swearing up and down they didn't push any button. Plus, only that corner of the building was brought down. The explosives are rigged so they all obviously _all_ go off in order for the entire building to be reduced to a heap, not just one isolated section."

"Which means," said Adam, showing signs of life for the first time but still not actually moving in his chair, shifting his gaze or unfolding his arms, "That even if one of the demo crew are lying about setting it off, the fact that it was clearly re-rigged means it's not an accident."

"Exactly," Jo said.

"Which is why unless we can prove that that was the only section tampered with and the only one going to explode unexpectedly, the bomb squad has to clear each detonation point," Lindsey finished.

Jo nodded.

"But how are we supposed to do that when a) our crime scene no longer exists, and b) we're not allowed to get to it in the first place?" Danny broke in.

"Hopefully something in what Adam brought out and what we get off the victim will lead us somewhere," Jo said.

"You thinking this might still tie back to Wesley Parrot's murder?" Sid asked.

"Maybe," Jo shrugged, "Maybe whoever set off the explosion was only planning on burying the crime scene and panicked when they saw Adam come out with some of the evidence and pushed the button not even thinking there were still people inside." Jo swallowed hard.

"But then why didn't they bring it down right away or just leave it for the when the building was going to be brought down anyway? Why then when it was basically too late and wasn't going to accomplish anything?" Danny asked in total frustration.

"I don't know," Jo said, shaking her head, "You're right, not much of this makes any sense whatsoever, especially when our hands are tied as much as they are."

"And we don't even have a body," Sid spoke up, "So why am I…?"

"Because some shots of the victim are on Adam's camera."

"Not directly," Adam elaborated, "Mac took those. But if I enhance what I got maybe you could at least confirm some stuff?"

"Possibly," Sid said cautiously, "I won't make any promises ahead of time, but I'll certainly do my best."

"Adam, are you doing ok?" Jo asked him gently.

"Yeah. Yeah I'm fine," he replied quietly, "I'm not going home, boss."

Jo squeezed his arm encouragingly. "Okay," she said. She looked around the table at the grim faces that met her, "So, Adam, obviously I want you on those pictures you took. Get what you can to Sid and see if there's _anything_ else in any of the background you ended up with that might help as well. Danny, Lindsey, I want the two of you on the evidence that Adam brought back. I know it includes the murder weapon, so let's see if we can track down our killer and find out if he has anything to do with the building coming down. I'm going to help Flack thoroughly background check and interview each person involved with the demolition crew." She paused before continuing in a very controlled voice, "I don't need to tell any of you, the clock is ticking."

**xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx**

As Mac slowly got used the darkness, and the acute edge of his pain dulled, he bit back a sarcastic, adrenaline induced half-laugh. The vast majority people never went through a single building collapse in their lives, let alone three times, all due to bombings. He wondered what sort of ill-doomed fate seemed to follow him, and in the back of his head he had to admit he had caught himself wondering at times when it would catch up to him.

Despite the pain from his physical injuries, the cold, however, quickly became the primary thing his state of being revolved around. The building itself wasn't even remotely warm to begin with, and his clothes which were now soaked through, clung frigidly to his body, leeching an ever increasing amount of heat from him. He did his best to control his shivering to a constant, tight tremble as the larger involuntary muscle contractions sent shock waves of compounded pain shooting through his body. But the water continued to both seep between the rubble and run underneath him, and the icy cold was brutal and relentless. The complete inescapability of the physical pain his position inflicted on him, ate at the edges of his mind, pressed in on him, and threatened to take over if he let it. He could feel exhaustion start to enter the whole equation, both mental and physical, and the part of him that was simply worn out of surviving seeming improbables and defying the odds was severely tempted to not put forth any extra effort and just accept whatever outcome would happen, even though he knew that outcome would probably not be in his favor. But the image of Devon enthusiastically doing his best to copy the lead role in _Lord of Dance_ all the way down the sidewalk and even while he was brushing his teeth and getting into bed asking, eyes shining, _"Can I do it too, Daddy? Can I? Please!" _after Mac had taken him to see the show the prior evening, rushed back to his memory. And Mac knew he couldn't just quit.

He pulled himself back together.

In an attempt to keep himself focused on anything but what he was going through, he mentally started disassembling every weapon that he had ever used, starting with his .40cal handgun that almost never left his belt and going back through each weapon he had used in the military. He methodically took them apart piece by piece, holding the image of even the smallest component in his mind until he was ready to put it back together.

Shivering and in pain, any concept of how long he'd been trapped utterly gone, his body temperature inching down and hypothermia numbing more than just his fingers, the effort to stay focused and complete his self-appointed task was enormous. He found himself struggling to visualize even the M-16 which he had used and carried so much that it had essentially become an extension of himself. But he kept at it, beyond the motivation to survive and hope that Devon's enthusiasm for _Lord of the Dance_ and potential Irish dance lessons was just a phase, dreading the dark places his mind would go as time passed and he lost an ever increasing grip on a sense of reality.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: ** _Not much of a note or explanation on this one as I think everything pretty much explains itself (in regards to any backstory)_. _And just so all you wonderful followers and readers are aware, I just had a baby, so if you could bare with me with any delays or sporadicness of updates that would be awesome :) Hope you all enjoy this chapter and thank you so much for reading!_

* * *

**Chapter 3**

Four hours later and Jo and Flack were beyond frustrated. Flack had requisitioned three of his fellow detectives to run background checks on every employee of the demolition company that had been in charge of bringing down the apartment buildings, while he and Jo had conducted interviews on everyone. What they had ended up with was a big fat nothing. No connection to the original victim and no discernible motive of anyone on the crew to either bury the crime scene or take out anyone from the police department. And given the extremely high standard the demolition company required of its employees due to the nature of the job, no one had more than a smudge on their record beyond the odd unpaid parking ticket. Not even Tom Cartwright who Flack, based on Adam's relation of the man's cavalier attitude before the explosion, had vigorously questioned at the hospital. Despite Flack wanting smash the man's face in due to his still belligerent and arrogant demeanor before two minutes had gone by in the interview, Don was forced to admit that he was no closer to figuring out a connection between what had happened and Cartwright or the demolition crew.

If the front doors to the hospital hadn't been automatic, Flack would have probably knocked them clean off their hinges as he stormed out. He took several long breaths in an effort to calm down. He glanced at his watch, cursing at the speed with which time was slipping by. He pulled his phone out of his coat pocket and called Jo. As he waited a few seconds for her to answer, he let his head drop back and took a brief moment to feel the sun on his face. It was one of those days when he'd normally enjoy the fact that the sun was out and starting to warm the chilly, early spring air. But instead, all he could think about was imagining how cool, almost cold, it would feel without the sun directly on him and about the temperature conditions Mac was in and would be dealing with on top of any injuries he had in all probability sustained.

"_Please tell me you got something," _Jo answered her phone.

Flack pulled his thoughts away from the ultra-depressing downward spiral they had rapidly been spinning and redirected them to the not-much-better-mostly-depressing immediate matter at hand. "Wish I could," Flack answered with a sigh, "Cartwright's a piece of work, but if there's a connection between him and the explosion, I'm not seeing it."

"_Dammit,"_ Jo swore under her breath.

"Jo?" Flack said quietly.

"_Yeah?"_

"I have to pick up Devon from school." Flack could almost see Jo's face, the one she got when she felt for someone and wanted to scoop them up and give them a hug and make everything better.

"_What are you going to do with him?"_ Jo asked, _"Do you know if Mac had a babysitter or anything for him this afternoon?"_

"Actually, he was planning on leaving work early and taking Devon to the Yankees game." From the almost inaudible sound that Jo made into the phone, Flack could envision her look become even more pronounced than before. "I can't exactly take him to the precinct to hang out, Jo," Flack finished.

"_Take him to my place. Ellie will be home and she's babysat for him several times."_

They both paused.

"_What are you going to tell him?"_ Jo asked finally.

"I don't know," Flack admitted, "I'm hoping something will come to me on the drive to his school." He swallowed hard. He adored his godson and loved having an excuse to get on the floor and play with legos and read stories in different voices, but Mac was the one who was good with kids and this sort of really serious difficult stuff. Jo was good at it too. Not him.

"_Don, don't you dare sell yourself short. You'll find the most perfect thing to say,"_ Jo told him as if reading his mind, _"That kid looks up to you next to only Mac."_

Flack nodded, not even thinking about the fact that Jo couldn't see his response. "You sure Ellie will be fine with babysitting at the last minute?" he asked.

Jo made a dismissive sound into the phone. _"Absolutely. She loves having an excuse to make her specialty hot dog pizza. I'll call her and give her a heads up. How long do you think you guys will be before you get over there?"_

Flack thought for a couple seconds, "An hour, hour and a half?" he guessed.

"_Take whatever time you need,"_ Jo told him, _"I'm going to head back to the lab and see if anyone's gotten anything more encouraging than all our pertinent negatives."_

"Sounds good," Flack said, "I'll call you in a little bit." He put the phone back in his coat pocket before blowing out another long breath to the sky and heading for the parking ramp and his car and a little boy who was expecting to spend the evening at Yankees Stadium.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Flack pulled up outside Devon's elementary school a couple minutes after it had let out. He had picked the boy up a couple times before so he knew the spot in the front of the school where Devon normally met Mac. Flack watched as a look of momentary surprise cross the boy's face before his eyes lit up and he rushed over.

"Uncle Don!" he said, giving Flack a big hug before remembering that he was already seven and that his friends might still be around. He stepped back and adjusted his backpack.

"Hey, kiddo," Flack said, pulling Devon back to him briefly and ruffling his hair. "How are you?" he asked as the two headed back to Flack's car.

"Good," Devon replied. "Where's dad?"

Flack paused for the briefest of seconds, "He's…still at work. Hey, you want to go get some ice cream or something a minute?"

Devon's face all but glowed at the idea of going to get ice cream in the middle of the afternoon for no particular reason. "Yeah!" he announced.

"Well get in!" Flack gestured to his car.

xxx

After choosing gummy bears and chocolate syrup to go on top of his ice cream, Devon climbed up on one of the high chairs that were in front of the counter table running along one side of the ice cream shop.

"Here ya go," Flack said, placing the boy's ice cream bowl in front of him and perching on the seat next to Devon.

Devon dug into the sticky treat with relish and demolished over half the bowl and had chocolate smudged around his mouth before he was sufficiently full of sugar to be somewhat distracted. "Is daddy going to meet us here?" he asked Flack, trying to lick of the chocolate from his mouth with his tongue and only succeeding in spreading it further.

"Here," Flack said, grabbing a napkin and wiping Devon's mouth for him.

The boy returned to his ice cream, looking up at Flack and waiting for an answer to his question.

"No," Flack said.

"Why not?" Devon queried, half-puzzlement and half-disappointment in his voice and face.

Flack put down his spoon and turned so he was completely facing Devon.

Devon, picking up the seriousness in Flack's face grew rather somber as well as he instinctively gathered that something was wrong.

Flack took a deep breath. He still hadn't figured out what to say and just started talking, trying to remember what the world had looked like to him when he was seven, and hoping that the words would simply come to him. "You know how at work your dad figures out how and why really bad things happen to people and helps put the people who did those bad things in jail?"

Devon nodded.

"Well," Flack shifted slightly in his seat, a little unsure about the level of detail to go into with Devon, but figuring the kid would be able tomore fully and completely understand broad specifics as opposed to crap generalized vagueness, he decided to be fairly blunt and straight-forward, "This morning your dad went to an apartment where someone had been killed."

"Killed?" Devon repeated, his eyes going big as he realized that he was being talked to at the highest adult level he ever had been in his whole life.

Flack nodded, "mm-hmm."

"So is he still trying to figure out who did it?" Devon asked.

"Not exactly," Flack said, "See, when he was at the apartment building collecting clues to figure out who killed this person, there was an accident."

"What sort of accident?" Devon asked in a very small voice.

This was the part Flack had been dreading. "Well, probably whoever the bad guy was who killed the person, decided he didn't want anyone figuring out what had happened because someone made part of the building collapse."

Devon had completely forgotten about what was left of his ice cream. "Where daddy was getting clues?" he almost whispered in a shaky voice.

Flack nodded.

"Is he okay?" Devon asked, his eyes starting to shimmer, "Daddy's okay, isn't he?"

Flack thought his heart would break and he had to swallow back the lump that developed in his throat. He gathered the little boy into his lap and gave him a close hug. "Yeah," he said, blinking back the moistness in his own eyes. He tightened his arms around Devon's shoulders, "Your dad is going to be okay. He's stuck inside the building right now, but we're going to him out and he's going to be just fine. You hear me, big guy? He's going to be just fine."

Devon nodded without looking up and wiped the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. "When will you get him out?" he asked.

Flack again made the decision to be honest. "I don't know," he said, "Soon, but I don't know for sure."

Devon snuffled and nodded again, "You promise to get him out?"

"Absolutely," Flack said. He pulled Devon close to him again and kissed the top of the boy's head.

Neither of them said anything for a minute. Flack could feel Devon's fear for Mac, tempered by the boy trying desperately to emulate his father and be nothing but brave.

"Can I stay with you while you get daddy out?" Devon asked finally.

"No, big guy," Flack told him gently, "I've also got find out who made the building collapse and that could get pretty dangerous."

Devon nodded. He knew enough about what Mac did and had hung out with his godfather enough to understand.

"You have your phone, right?" Flack asked the boy. Mac had been pretty successful at controlling his work hours since he had adopted Devon three years ago, but the intrinsic unpredictability of his job meant that once Devon had started 1st grade, Mac had gotten him a basic phone so he could personally let the boy know if he had to stay late or if plans had to be changed. The personal, grown-up approach had worked fantastically in Devon adapting to the sometimes wild randomness of having a single parent working in the sort of job Mac had.

"Yep," Devon replied.

"Okay. Well for right now, I'm going to take you over so Ellie can babysit you. She's going to make her hot-dog pizza and you're going to chill and I'm going to call you," Flack tapped Devon's chest with his finger, "As soon we get your dad out. Deal?"

Devon thought for a serious moment. "Deal," he said finally.

Knowing the shrinking odds as the afternoon passed and with lead in his stomach, Flack prayed he'd be calling the boy sooner rather than later and with good news.

**xxxxxxxxxxxx**

In utter darkness with absolutely no concept of time, Mac shivered, his body otherwise limp from the cold and pain, his breathing shallow beneath the weight of the concrete on him, and he felt himself start to slip despite his efforts.


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: **_Yay, I've finally gotten back to writing on a semi-regular basis at least! Although the new little kiddo is extremely demanding :D Thank you all so much for your patience, and I can only hope I can write the rest of this to make the hiatus worth it. Thanks for reading and all of your reviews!_

* * *

**Chapter 4**

Mac jerked his eyes open. He hadn't even caught himself drifting off. The realization scared him, and he mentally shook himself. But the unrelenting endlessness of the ache of the cold, the dark, the numbing pain of the debris weighing on him, the silence…_wait, the silence_, he thought. There was no more water dripping. Since when had that stopped? He couldn't remember. He frowned and searched his brain but didn't have the slightest recollection of the sound of the water stopping. It disturbed him deeply. Just when he thought he couldn't lose any further sense of time, he did. Just how long _had _it been since he was consciously aware of what was around him? He wasn't supposed to slip like that. That was how people died.

"_Situational awareness!"_

Even though it was decades ago, he could still hear his old Drill Instructors boom the phrase. And constantly paying attention to every detail around him had become a part of his life. At first so he didn't get into trouble with his Instructor's and cadre, and then out of survival as he'd come to realize exactly why they had pounded it into his head, and finally as something he did simply from ingrained habit and as what had turned him into the police officer and detective that he was. But now, not only had he not caught himself becoming unaware of the moment, he didn't even have the foggiest clue when he'd lost it.

He strained his ears searching for some sort of noise, something which he could focus on and that could act as an anchor. But the silence was deafening. Without any auditory or visual input, it was like he was floating in a vacuum that had been reduced to the most basic and rawest of existences. He could barely even feel the floor beneath his numb fingers. All he could do was focus on getting through one shallow breath at a time. He found himself counting the rise and fall of his chest in groups of five in his head.

_One…two…three…four…five…_

_One…two…three…four…five…_

He pictured Devon sitting on floor and doing his homework for the day on the coffee table… _"Dad, I suck at rhyming words!" _… Mac had hated them too when he was little. "_Rhyming is stupid!" _he had told his mother emphatically one day.

_One…two…three…four…five…_

He saw the indentation of the pencil on paper as Devon pressed it down as he filled out his math sheet…

_One…two…three…four…five…_

_One…two…_

His thoughts drifted in no particular direction… Where had he been in his count? Oh yeah…

_One…two…three…_

**xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx**

"Jo! JoJoJoJoJoJo!" Adam called as she passed, scurrying out of the room where he and Sid had been pouring over the pictures of the crime scene that Adam had taken.

Jo turned a few steps past the door Adam almost bounded from. "Are you okay?" she asked, looking at him quizzically and wondering if he'd suffered a mild concussion after all.

"Yeah yeah," he said hurriedly. He motioned with his hand over shoulder, "Just, come on."

"You found something?" Jo asked, hope daring to make her heart beat quicker as she followed Adam to the workstation where he and Sid had been analyzing the pictures and where the medical examiner waited for them, a shine of success shining in his eyes.

"Maybe," Adam said, "I mean, I think so. I'm fairly certain."

"Well, spit it out!" Jo said, coming around the table to look at the monitor screens.

Adam and Sid glanced at each other trying to figure out which of them should speak first.

"You go first," Sid said.

"Ok," Adam replied, taking a deep breath and collecting his thoughts. His ears were still ringing loudly, but at least he could hear normally again. "I'm not sure if it's definitive enough to get us inside, but one of the charges was actually at our crime scene and I was able to get a decent look at it. It was definitely tampered with to go off on its own."

"Obviously," Jo said.

"Yes, well, while I can't tell you if whoever re-rigged it messed with any of the other charges it looks like they definitely knew what they were doing."

"I'm still not following how this helps us," Jo said.

"Our vic went to NYU, right?"

"Yeah, with a major in electrical engineering," Jo said, "But Adam, he didn't blow himself up. He was already dead if you remember."

"Yes, I know that," Adam replied with a hint of exasperation, "But what if he was the one who had the whole thing set up to kill someone else but he ended up the victim instead and whoever his intended target was triggered the explosion after he killed him in self-defense."

"But why do that instead of call the police?" Jo asked.

Adam shrugged, "Maybe Parrot had dirt on whoever the other person is and that's why the two of them were in that building to begin with. Maybe Parrot was threatening to blackmail him."

"Then why would Parrot have rigged the explosive?" Jo asked.

"A threat that was meant to impress?" Adam hazarded.

"Maybe," Jo said reluctantly, "It still doesn't quite fit, but you might be on to something with his emphasis at NYU. Maybe was some sort of internal student rivalry gone bad… Who knows at this point, everything else we've come up with has gotten us nowhere. I know he didn't stay on campus, but I'll get Flack to look more closely his school associates." She took a deep breath as if filing everything in its proper place and slogging forward, "Sid, did you get anything from what Adam brought back?"

Sid sat up from where he'd been hanging back and waiting for Adam to be finished. "Not much," he admitted, "Parrot definitely seems to have been killed by a significant blow to the head somewhere around the right occipital region. Although it's hard to say exactly with how matted his hair is with blood."

"So from behind," Jo mused, "Either surprised or wasn't expecting an attack." Her phone rang. She held up one finger to Sid and Adam who waited. "Danville," she answered.

"_Jo, it's Lindsey."_

Jo didn't know whether to feel hopeful or cynical.

"_We got only two usable sets of prints off the baseball bat. There were some others, but they were underneath the blood spatter that was on the handle of the bat and quite smudged. One of the sets belonged to our vic…"_

"Lindsey, you better not tell me that the other wasn't in AFIS," Jo said, half-expecting that to be the case given how everything else was going so far.

"_Actually,"_ Lindsey said, a smile in her voice, _"Our unknown person got himself booked on public intoxication and indecent exposure a couple years ago."_

Jo felt hope for the first time.

"_His name is Quentin Cooper and he also goes to NYU. I already called the university to get his student information, and guess his major."_

Jo didn't dare for fear any budding optimism would be crushed.

"_Electrical engineering. He and Wesley Parrot were in the same senior lab._"

A hopeful, urgent renewed sense of purpose and direction shot through Jo as her eyes lit up at the first good news of the day. "Is Danny there?" she asked.

"_Yes,"_ Lindsey replied.

"Right, I'm going to call Flack, have him get a warrant, and then I want Danny to go with him to scoop up this Quentin Cooper." Jo smiled vindictively. Mr. Cooper was not going to have a pleasant time when Don Flack knocked on his door. She turned back, "Adam, good work. I'm going to take any technical readout data you can put together for me and see if what we have is enough for that fire chief in rescue command to let us in. And thanks, Sid."

Sid shrugged, "Wish I could have given you more."

"No. If this Cooper is the one who did it, what you got is great corroborating evidence to use as pressure for a confession," Jo told him. And Jo prayed that Quentin Cooper really was their guy, because time was slipping away with hideous rapidity, and if he wasn't, they would be back at square one.

**xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx**

"No, all I'm saying is that it's criminal that Hawkeye got barely twelve minutes of screentime!" Riley Ehlich argued in reference to _The Avengers_.

"He's just a squishy human who can't even shoot a gun," the rescue guy with whom Riley was talking, said, rapidly recognizing an opportunity to have some fun and push the young woman's buttons.

"He is _not_ just a 'squishy human'," Riley returned hotly, "He was the only one smart enough to figure out the Tesseract was a door that was being manipulated from the other side. And may I also say that without a snazzy suit that could fly into outer space, a huge unkillable hulk body, the quality of being a demi-god, or a serum induced alteration, he still kicked as much ass and in way cooler style as everyone else."

"You just like him 'cause he's hot," James, her partner, teased as he walked up, handing her a coffee and interrupting the discussion.

"Shut up," Riley said hurriedly, embarrassed.

"Shall I tell them what you have on your iPod," James continued relentlessly, his eyes sparkling wickedly.

"No," Riley returned just a bit too quickly.

James grinned and the rest of the rescue crew circled in like sharks.

"It's nothing," Riley said, trying to be non-chalantly dismissive.

James just continued grinning wolfishly. "She's got Hawkeye as her lock-screen and more Hawkeye as her home-screen and she stares at them for a few seconds before turning the iPod off or sliding the lock-screen."

Riley wanted nothing more than to stuff her partner into the oxygen compartment on the outside of their truck and leave him there for the rest of the year. Instead, she buried herself in her coffee and tried to brush off the needling that instantly poured on her head from the rest of highly amused crew.

"Hey, whoa! What was that?!" Riley suddenly exclaimed, turning and reflexively flinching as a booming shudder reverberated across the street to where they were staged.

"Don't know," James replied pushing himself off the folding table he'd been leaning against and taking a few steps forward. Both medics looked over at the collapsed apartment building they were waiting to be able to access. A small plume of new dust hung in the air at the corner that was blown out, and to Riley it looked as if that corner had had an extra bite taken out of it.

"I think more of the floors gave way," she said.

She and James exchanged a look, the casual atmosphere that had existed a moment earlier was gone. They would never say it out loud, but between the initial explosion, the length of time of the continued exposure the missing detectives would be enduring, and now this, there was a very real possibility that when all was said and done, the two of them wouldn't be needed.

xxx

As Jo and the fire chief also instinctively flinched and ducked as the building collapsed further, the chief turned to Jo. "Hell no," he said, "I might have considered letting a team go in based on what you've given me so far, but not now. I am _not_ risking my guys without concrete knowledge of what's going on in there. Sorry, that's it," he said emphatically as Jo opened her mouth to protest, "I am not having this discussion any further." He turned and stalked off.

Jo fumed as she was left standing by herself and she flung the report she held in her hand to the ground in angry frustration. Quentin Cooper seemed now to be their only ticket to not only get answers, but have any chance of getting Mac and Detective Morrow out of that building alive.

**xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx**

Half-awake and half-dreaming, not even sure what strange tangents his mind was taking in the timeless cold and silence, Mac was suddenly jerked fully alert as the building shook and settled and crashed violently. He instinctively turned his head to the side and covered it with his right arm as smaller but not insignificant pieces of rubble tumbled from somewhere around him, striking and reverberating on what was lying across his lower body and catching his already broken left arm, trapping and rolling it at an angle. He about screamed as he felt the bones in that arm twist in directions they were never supposed to go. As the new debris settled, he coughed and breathed out loud in agony, his chest rising rapidly and unevenly as he tried to force back and wait out the worst of the new pain that enveloped him.

But his left arm was now being held at a completely unnatural angle and the pain refused to let up, sending tendrils of near-desperation through him at its relentlessness. Despite the pull on the rest of his trapped body at the movement, he reached across. But even though his numb fingertips seemed to barely brush against the chunk of broken concrete that was now on top of his left arm, it shifted several inches and pulled his arm with it, rolling it even further. He dropped back to the floor, his voice frozen his throat as he struggled to comprehend the pain that was sent screaming through him. He lay still for a minute fighting to regain control and gradually took restock of his situation. If he didn't have one before, he definitely now had an open fracture, and the most microscopic movement he made caused the exposed bones in his arm to grate against the concrete. It was pure torture. As bad as he knew the process was going to be, he had to free his arm for his lasting sanity.

Steeling himself, the cold forgotten and ignoring the sharp edge of something that dug in at the bottom of his rib cage, he raised his head and shoulders. He reached across as far as he could and pushed with his right hand against the chunk of rubble that was on his lower arm while simultaneously pulling with his left shoulder in the opposite direction. He felt his arm try to move in two separate directions as the weight of the debris pinning his forearm in place competed with the pull from his shoulder. He had known it was going to be bad, but he gasped as the explosion of pain shocked his brain into a near standstill. He almost gave up right then and there; but he braced every muscle in his body, channeling every ounce of willpower. Each second lasted an agonizing eternity and he was pushed to a point where he honestly thought he couldn't take it a moment longer. But somehow he kept his efforts going, the darkness around him swallowing his cries into its endless oblivion as his arm slowly inched out from under the block of concrete.

Finally, with a last yell of absolute desperation, he managed to shove the piece of rubble aside far enough to drag his arm out from underneath it.

He collapsed back and closed his eyes, unable to do anything more than breathe as pain coursed through his whole body. But as it finally eased back to a level where he no longer thought he might lose his mind, and he knew his efforts had been worth it.

But he wearily realized that despite freeing his arm, he couldn't move or feel his hand at all. It wasn't just that it hurt too much, try as he might, he couldn't even twitch his fingers. Part of him realized that he really should care more about this new complication, but his mind was numb and overwhelmed from trying to comprehend everything and process the implications of his situation which only managed to get worse.

The cold which he had temporarily forgotten about, seeped back, and he started shivering again. He was also paying the price for the pull and torque he had placed on his lower body during his efforts to free his arm, the right side of his body from just below his rib cage all the way down his leg pulsing with a renewed sharp ache.

It was too much, and he was about done.


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N:** _There's not much to preface this chapter with except a huge thanks for any of you who still are still reading this story! Part of the reason for the delay was that this chapter and the next got written pretty much together. Bad side: this one took forever to publish. Good news: the next chapter is already almost done. Again, thank you everyone for reading, and a special big thank you for all my reviewers! Your comments really mean a lot!_

* * *

**Chapter 5**

Flack pushed his clip into his gun, flicking the switch that snapped the slide forward and automatically loaded the first bullet. His jaw was set and his eyes were dangerously determined. Jo's news of the most recent collapse and the fire chief's refusal to let any rescue crew in had turned his stomach to leaden ice. Besides his own fear of losing both a colleague and his best friend, he couldn't stop picturing Devon staying up and waiting for Don to call him. The sun was slipping below the horizon and the chill of night was setting in, bringing with it a sense of tragic finality.

Flack shook himself and tried to banish such lines of thought. Next to him, Danny also readied his weapon, his body language a bit less controlled than Flack's as the two of them and the ESU team got into position outside Quentin Cooper's apartment door. Flack interrogated the leader of the team with a look to see if everyone was ready, and upon receiving a small nod, he knocked on the door.

"NYPD, open up!"

There was no answer.

Flack waited about five seconds longer before trying the handle to see if it was locked, and finding that it was, he signaled for ESU to break in the door. It crashed open with a splintering sound as the dead bolt ripped away from the frame and Flack, Danny and the team entered the apartment, weapons drawn.

It was a typical, small, college student's space with a hodge-podge of mismatched, second-hand furniture, packages of instant Ramen on the counter, yet what looked like a very new iMac sitting on the beat-up desk in the living room.

"Clear!" called Flack as his cursory glance around made it quite evident Quentin Cooper wasn't in the main area of the apartment. Danny and the ESU team who had gone down the small hall to check the only two other rooms – a very small bedroom and an equally proportionately tiny bathroom – also quickly echoed the same word. Flack practically slammed his gun back into its holster as Danny joined him, mirroring his frustration.

"There's drawers open and it looks like clothes missing," Danny told him, "I'm guessing this is our guy and he ran."

"GodDAMNit!" Flack exclaimed fighting back the overwhelming urge to throw something very hard against the wall. He pointed at Danny, seething, "Get an APB out on this fucker. I want his face circulated to every patrol cop, bus station and train station in the city, and trackers put on his cell phone and any credit and debit cards and bank accounts he might have." He very rarely swore on the job, but this last piece of misfortune was too much, and his professional self-control snapped.

Danny nodded. "Done," he said, "I'll also get Adam over here to see if he can get anything from this guy's computer."

As Danny took a few steps away to make his own phone calls, Flack, still seething, pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed Jo's number. "Jo?...yeah…no, he's not here…" On the other end, Flack heard Jo indulge in her own string of choice epitaphs. Flack waited for her to finish venting her frustration, and in her voice, he could hear the creeping fear that was eating at him with an increasing edge of desperation.

"Does he have any family in the city or area he might have gone to?" Flack asked.

"_No,"_ Jo replied, _"He's from Buffalo and all his family is there."_

Flack felt tempted to swear again. If Cooper had decided to make a run for it and head to Buffalo, he could be almost there by now. "Girlfriend?" he asked Jo.

"_Don't know yet. I've got Lindsey and a couple other detectives from your precinct re-interviewing Cooper's and Parrot's classmates."_

"Alright," Flack said in a heavy, tight voice in almost disbelief of yet another stalled or dead lead, "Do me a favor and contact Buffalo PD for me will ya, just in case, even though I doubt that's where he's gone."

"_Already way ahead of you,"_ Jo said.

There was a brief pause.

"Any word from rescue command?" Flack asked quietly.

"_They sent the bomb squad back in to continue clearing the charges,"_ Jo said, _"But considering they have to clear both buildings, it's going to take hours yet."_

Neither Flack nor Jo said anything further. They both knew that if they had survived, Mac and Vanessa did not have hours.

"Is Adam on his way over?" Flack asked finally.

"_Left the instant Danny called,"_ Jo said.

Flack took a deep breath, "Okay, I'm going to hang out here while he hopefully works his computer genius and see if me and Danny can scrounge anything from the apartment that might indicate where Cooper's gone."

"_Sounds good,"_ Jo replied, "_I'll talk to you later."_

Flack pushed 'END' and tried to put a quick stop to the tailspin his thoughts descended to if Cooper had indeed decided to head for Buffalo. But he had no sooner slid his phone back into his pocket, than it vibrated and beeped with an incoming text. It was Jo.

_Just heard from Lindsey. Yes to grlfrnd. Marion Dombrowski. 2247 W 184__th__ St apt 8F_

His heart rate immediately reaccelerating in hope, Flack instantly texted back.

_Headed there now. Leaving Danny & Adam to finish here._

xxxxxxxxxx

"NYPD, open up!" Flack called through the door after sharply knocking on it. He was once again standing outside an apartment, gun drawn, ESU team in position. But this time someone answered. The young woman looked shocked as she opened the door and was greeted by the geared-up and menacing looking ESU team. She opened her mouth to say something but was completely lost for words.

"Are you Marion Dombrowski?" Flack asked.

"Y-yes," the young woman managed to stammer.

"I'm Detective Flack with the NYPD and we're looking for your boyfriend, Quentin Cooper. Is he here?"

"Ummm, yeah, he is," she answered in utter bewilderment, "Can I ask what this is about?"

"We have a warrant for…" but Flack cut off what he was saying as behind Marion, he saw someone make a sudden dash for the window on the other side of the apartment. "Hey!" he shouted, shoving past Cooper's girlfriend and towards the retreating figure, "Hold it right there!"

The attempted fugitive looked furtively over his shoulder at Flack as he tried to duck out the window to the fire escape. But Flack had no intentions of letting him come close to getting away and crossed the small apartment before the would-be escapee could finish fumbling with the window lock. Flack grabbed him by the back of his jacket and practically flipped him to ground, pinning him in place with a heavy knee between his shoulder blades.

"Owowowowow!" the young man protested as Flack yanked his arms unsympathetically behind his back, "Hey what did I do?!"

"I told you to hold it right there," Flack bit out. He leaned down as he synched handcuffs on the youngster, "I don't like scumbags who run. Are you Quentin Cooper?"

"Yes. OW!" Quentin answered as Flack clicked the cuffs a notch tighter. "What did I…"

"You're under arrest," Flack interrupted him as he hauled Quentin to his feet, "For the bombing of a New York apartment building, the murder of Wesley Parrot, and the attempted murder of two New York Police Detectives." He uttered a silent prayer that the latter charge would stay 'attempted murder'.

"What?! No! I didn't…" Quentin started to splutter as he twisted and tried to pull away.

"You have the right to remain silent," Flack cut him off in a voice colder than ice as he and one of the ESU team instantly doubled their combative suspect over by lifting his handcuffed arms up and away from his back, hyperextending his shoulders. "You have the right to an attorney," Flack continued as they led Quentin out of the apartment to continued protests of "OW!"

From the door, Quentin's girlfriend still stood rooted to the spot, hands by her face and her eyes huge in complete disbelief of the whirlwind that had just happened.

xxxxxxxxxx

If ever there had been an interrogation of doom, this was it.

Quentin Cooper sat, practically shriveling in on himself under the glares of Flack and Jo. Flack in particular was making Quentin squirm as he was standing menacingly over him, arms crossed and with an air of an executioner. Quentin kept sneaking glances up at the grim detective, and quickly bringing his eyes back down every time. Not that Jo bought him any breathing room in comparison, and Quentin was reduced to sitting in a miserable heap in his chair.

"Let's start with, are there any more tampered demolition charges than the one that already went off?" Jo said.

"I didn't…" Quentin tried to protest.

"Oh I wouldn't," Jo said leaning across the table ever so slightly.

Quentin averted his gaze.

"With the charges you're facing and the evidence we have for them, and what's at stake, to say it's in your best interest to cooperate with us is an understatement."

A charged silence hung in the air.

"I wanna lawyer," Quentin said finally, trying to put some defiance in his voice and failing miserably.

Flack smiled humorlessly and Quentin shrunk back down. "Oh yeah, we can wait for your lawyer," Flack said, "Although I'm assuming you don't already have one so we'll have to wait for one to get assigned to you. But that's alright. No problem. That's your right."

Quentin braved a look up. And instantly regretted it.

"But you remember that last charge I arrested you on?" Flack asked, speaking very deliberately.

Quentin nodded once.

"You pulled off your little explosive stunt when two detectives were in the building." Flack paused. "They're still trapped inside. And we can't even begin to look for them until we can prove there won't be another unplanned explosion." Flack paused again before leaning his hands on the table and bringing his gaze to within inches of their suspect's. "By all means, delay this whole process if you want; but given how long they've been trapped already, I suggest you cooperate right now if you don't want to deal with the consequences of murdering two cops." Flack refused to accept the very real possibility that that might already be the case.

Quentin almost audibly gulped.

"So I'll ask you again," Jo said, "Are there any more tampered charges?"

**xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx**

_As the minutes ticked by, it seemed to Mac as if his current situation was all there ever had been and all there was going to be. In hypothermia now so deep he could feel himself slowly stop shivering, he had nothing left to keep himself fixed within a sense of reality. His mind wandered. It jumped from one dark memory to another, places and events he'd eventually learned to live with but whose recollection still filled him with a level of despairing, hopeless emptiness, and whose acuteness he now relived – faces of friends and comrades who had died in front of him, blood in sand and on pavement, missions gone bad and the visceral fear involved that was like no other, back to when he was a kid and Jimmy's brother being beaten to death…_

_Time clicked on. All he knew was pain and cold. He wasn't even aware when he slipped in and out of consciousness._

_He became cognizant of his ultimate fate becoming less and less certain, and an old unknown came back to torment him. He found himself wondering if this was how Claire had died. It was something that had haunted him for years with a pain he couldn't begin to quantify or describe. He didn't and would never know if she had died instantly or had been trapped, half-crushed in utter darkness and in pain like he was now, waiting for him to find her and rescue her…_

_…waiting until he never did…_

_…and she had died utterly alone._

_It was something that had invaded his dreams, yanked him out of his sleep and left him shaking at its horror. The rational part of his brain tried to tell him that the odds were she had died immediately since her body had never been found. But the truth was, he would never know, and the thought of the hopelessness and pain that she could have died in and that he had failed to save her from, came back to add to his torture. The multitude of horrible possibilities and scenarios of how she could have died crashed back for him to relive. He squeezed his eyes closed as the familiar knife of loss and mental agony twisted in his chest. But the absolute blackness made it impossible for him to push the memories and the anguish away._

_He lay in dark, alone, tormented, and struggling to survive._

**xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx**

In the observation room, Danny and Adam held their breath as Quentin looked between Flack and Jo, weighing his options.

"No," Quentin said finally and heavily, recognizing he'd rolled the dice and there was no going back, "That was the only one I rewired."

"You're absolutely sure?" Jo pressed.

"Yes," Quentin answered, sounding slightly peeved that they would doubt him.

Jo looked over at the glass towards Adam and Danny and nodded her head, but Danny already had his phone out to contact the rescue command and bomb squad with the information that the scene was safe.

But as huge as it was to be able to get a search initiated, it should have been started hours ago and Flack still had no news he could call Devon about. His insides twisted at the thought that it might already be too late. "Why?" he asked, "Why did you do it?"

"I didn't mean too," Quentin whined.

"You didn't mean to?" Flack echoed in disbelief, so furious he was almost shaking, "That's not the sort of thing that just happens out of the blue on its own!"

Jo lay a steadying hand on Flack's arm.

"Look, I'm telling you," Quentin's voice cracked in desperation under Flack's volcanic glare, "I didn't know there was anybody inside, let alone two cops! I didn't know they hadn't come out. Not until I saw the news."

"Which is when you fled to your girlfriend's," Jo filled in.

"Yes," Quentin said, defeated.

"Why don't you start from the beginning and tell us just how you 'didn't mean it'," Flack invited scathingly, pulling up a chair and sitting down.

Quentin fidgeted. "Hestolemyproject," he finally mumbled.

"What was that?" Jo asked.

"He stole my project," Quentin articulated more clearly, visibly resigning himself to the completeness of whatever fate was coming his way. "Well, not technically stole it. We were supposed to be working on our senior project together, but the week before our preliminary presentation about what we'd be doing, Wesley went to our professor and claimed the project for himself."

"I'm not following what the big deal is," Flack said.

Quentin let out an exasperated breath. "He was a moron!" he exclaimed. "Don't ask me how he managed to get through what school he did, but I was the one who came up with project idea, outlined the whole thing and worked out most of non-experimental data and purported outcomes."

"And he stole it for his own," Jo finished.

"YES!" Quentin practically exploded. "What the hell was I supposed to do?! I had no time to work through and propound a whole other project and he refused to let me back in or admit to our prof what he'd done. And if I went to our prof it would just look like I was trying to steal the idea from _him_."

"So you go the board of academic integrity," Flack said, hardly believing the story that emerging, "You don't lure someone out to a building that's going to be demo'd to kill them!" He shook his head as Quentin wilted.

"And I'm still not entirely following," Jo said, "What advantage would he have by finishing it by himself? And he can't have been that dumb if he was capable of doing so."

Quentin got sulky. "We were both planning on applying for the same post-grad internship, and to self-author what we were doing would have definitely been a leg up, not to mention how screwed over I would be having to come up with something from scratch. And fine, no, he wasn't entirely stupid. He could run an experiment and write a report. But to problem solve and come up with a project in the first place? That was too abstract for him. And I didn't intend to kill him. I was only planning on breaking his arm or something so he couldn't do the project solo, but somehow during the struggle I hit him on the back of his head. And that was it." Quentin lapsed into silence.

Flack and Jo just stared in disbelief at the unbelievability of the whole thing.

"Then what?" Jo prompted at last.

"I panicked," Quentin said, "But figured I had the perfect opportunity to get rid of the crime scene and the body so I rewired and programed the charge that was in that room. Then I realized I didn't have to do anything as the building was coming down in only a few hours."

"You didn't think they'd do a final check of the place and find the crime scene?" Jo asked.

"No," Quentin said miserably, "I went over to watch the building come down this morning and saw the police tape. When that one guy came out with a bunch of evidence bags I figured no one else was in there and didn't know what else to do."

"You know, for a smart guy, you're really incredibly dumb," Flack said as Jo stood up from the table and they turned to leave.

"Wait!" Quentin called.

Flack paused, his hand on the doorhandle.

"What about a deal for telling you everything?!"

"Should have waited for that lawyer if you wanted a deal," Flack said, pulling the door closed behind him and taking distinct satisfaction in the stunned look that came over Quentin Cooper's face.

* * *

They located Detective Morrow only an hour into the search & rescue effort. She had still been in the hallway when the blast went off, and although she had been trapped in the rubble, she escaped with only a concussion and a broken wrist.

But it was now midnight and Mac still hadn't been found. On the one hand, Flack took a sliver of comfort that as long a body wasn't recovered there was still hope his friend was alive. But as he watched his breath hang visibly on the cold air, he knew those odds were becoming almost non-existent.

The rescue crew had pretty much concluded that Mac must have ended up in the basement as thorough search of the where the first and second floors had been had yielded nothing. The problem was that the stairs were blocked and the search had been reduced to attempting to snake a video/audio search cable through to the lower level while a route down was chosen and cleared. That had been an hour ago.

Ellie had just called to say that Devon had finally collapsed in sleep on the couch, clutching his cell phone as he waited for Flack to call him. Flack leaned his elbows on his knees and hid his face in his hands.

Danny came up and lay a hand on Flack's shoulder. "Hey, Don, you alright?" he asked.

Flack looked up. "No. No I'm not," he admitted, "You?"

Danny just shook his head and sat down next to Flack. The two of them, exhausted, just watched the flood-light lit area and the swarm of emergency vehicles and personal which still filled the street. An intense purpose reigned, but it grew quieter and more desperate as optimism flagged.

Flack sipped at his coffee, barely tasting it.

"Hey I think I found him!" a voice suddenly called.

Flack felt his heart rate crash to a halt before racing forward impossibly fast. He stood up and hurried over to where the monitor for the search cable was set up. He almost didn't want to look at the screen.


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N:** _So the next chapter was turning out impossibly long so I decided to split it up and publish this portion now (which is also why it's shorter than every other chap). And yes, in anticipation of any response for where it ends, I know I am evil!_ _Again, the good news is though that the next one should also be able to be posted with almost as much rapidity as I was able to get this one out. Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed the last update! It's so encouraging! :)_

* * *

**Chapter 6**

Mac weakly half-lifted his head and squinted at the sudden, bright light as he cracked his eyes open.

On the other end of the cable, Jo felt her heart both leap and sink all at the same time. "Mac?!" she called into the speaker.

"Jo?" Mac said in a barely audible voice. He looked dreadful. The right side of his face was covered in dried blood and Jo could clearly make out about two inches of bone sticking out of his lower left arm. Except for his left leg from the knee down, the rest of him up to the middle of his chest was buried in rubble. And to say his dirt-streaked face looked pale was an understatement. He dropped his head limply back down and slowly closed his eyes.

"Hey Mac, Mac, stay with me, come on," Jo said.

Mac blearily opened his eyes again. The bright light that was at the end of the camera on the cable shone directly in his face making him unable to see anything beyond what was immediately in front of him. But it was enough to make out for the first time the steel frame and pieces of concrete that were lying across his body and crushing him. He squeezed his eyes closed as a sudden wave of violent, uncontrollable shivering sent flares of pain shooting throughout his whole body. _Would it never stop…?_ he thought pleadingly. But as the brief episode passed, he distantly realized that it actually _had_ been a long while since he had shivered on more than a very intermittent basis and quite soon his body temperature would be too low and he would stop entirely. The thought was almost welcoming as it brought with it a promise of no more pain or cold. And with that, combined with the simple comfort that he had been found, he almost relaxed, his body limp and far beyond exhausted, the light of the search cable shining through his closed eyelids.

Next to Jo, Flack watched the camera screen with a feeling of increasing dread at the sight of Mac lying nearly unconscious. He reached across Jo and keyed the mic, "Mac? Hey, Mac, you with me?" He drew an almost audible sigh of relief as, at the sound of his voice coming across the speaker, Mac slowly opened his eyes and lifted his head again.

"Don?" he asked, squinting.

"Yeah, it's me. How're you doing?" Flack watched as Mac lay his head back down, the momentary look of warm recognition in his eyes replaced with one of absolute exhaustion and pain.

"Not… not so good," Mac replied, forcing his voice to work.

Flack felt his stomach drop. Mac could have had a knife sticking out of his ribs and he would have insisted he was fine, and Don had kidded his friend on more than one occasion that he was the black knight from 'Monty Python' who kept fighting and saying, "It's just a flesh wound!" despite his limbs getting chopped off. Now, Mac's admittance that he wasn't fine, scared Flack more than anything else.

"Hang in there," Flack told him, "We've got a rescue crew working on getting through to you right now. It shouldn't be much longer."

Mac weakly nodded his head, feeling his eyes drift back closed, struggling to form a comprehension of anything outside of where he was and almost wishing for the warm oblivion of unconsciousness. But he was also intensely scared that if he willing gave in that he would never find his way back out.

"Tell me about Claire," Flack said, scrambling to try to think of something that would keep Mac talking and awake.

A look of complete surprise came over Mac. Claire was the last thing he had imagined Flack asking him about, especially considering it was thoughts of her that had plagued him and racked him with guilt for the last god knows how long. "What?" he asked, squinting his eyes back open.

"Where did you get married?" Flack asked.

Mac felt a small smile tug across his face as _that_ memory of her managed to cut though his immense and losing struggle. It send a calming peace through his mind, and the memory of her standing opposite him and smiling at him and the giddy happiness that had filled him and sent him soaring into the atmosphere, instantly obliterated the despair that thoughts of her death had pushed him towards.

"It was…on the beach…where we first met," Mac said, his eyes distant as he remembered that day in California all those years ago. He paused as he caught his breath, the weight of the concrete and steel on his chest making talking in more than mono-syllapbles exponentially more difficult.

Flack could see Mac's mental concentration slip and drift, and pain creep back into his face before he pulled himself back together and continued.

"I made her breakfast that morning," he added, his voice barely above a whisper. He didn't elaborate, it took too much effort, but Flack could almost see as memories made their way through his friend's mind and the element of peace that had now come over him.

"Oooh, special," Flack said.

But as much as they had calmed and centered his mind, the memories Flack had brought up did nothing to change his physical condition and difficulties, and Mac barely registered Flack's reply as he bit back a grimace against the crushing weight that was on his chest and the extra effort that talking required. He tried to cough in an effort to fill his lungs with air, but couldn't. He had a sudden vivid flashback to the pool training in Recon school and the hypoxic near-drowning situations that the instructors put them all through on an almost daily basis. He might not now be nearly drowning doing 'buddy breathing' with a single snorkel to share between him and someone else while they were dunked and pushed around and the water churned up around them by an instructor, but his current situation was ultimately providing the same net results.

"Toaster waffles," he said finally, taking a gasping breath and pushing back the instinctual panic of slowly accumulated oxygen deprivation and the inability to breath properly.

"What?" Flack asked.

Mac's faint smile returned. "It was… toaster waffles…for breakfast" he said, although he could feel himself falter as hypothermia continued to quietly but relentlessly tighten its grip on him as he used what scant stores of energy he had left. He was so cold at this point that he couldn't even tell if his fingers responded when he tried to move them, and the bone-deep, biting ache permeated every inch of his body. "She… she insisted on butter and syrup… getting in every square," Mac continued, fighting to keep his eyes open and hearing his words slur.

Flack burst out laughing. "Quite the romantic, aren't you," he said, "You better teach Devon to do better than that." For several long seconds Mac didn't speak and the sinking feeling in Flack's stomach started to form into a ten ton brick. Mac had been trapped for almost fourteen hours now having to deal with not only the injuries he had sustained, but temperatures that had been at best cool and then sub-freezing for the past four of those hours.

"That's…what his godfather…is for," Mac finally managed, "You're much better…at that stuff…than me…"

"Bull. shit." Flack smiled into the monitor, even though he knew Mac couldn't see him. But Mac's voice trailed off again and his eyes drifted closed. Flack leaned in to the mic, the brick in his stomach getting heavier, "Come on Mac. Talk to me. Stay with me buddy."

Mac dimly heard the sound of Flack's voice still talking to him over the cable and he tried to stay awake. He cracked his eyes open into the single bead of light that still watched him, but he was too tired and could no longer fight off the paralyzing cold and pain. A stillness crept through him, quieting everything, and he realized, as if it was someone else thinking the thought, that every last muscle in him had finally stopped shivering. He felt strangely relaxed as his body quit struggling and quit caring about the pain that still pulsed slowly through him. He had tried, but he hung on as long as he could. Objects and sound blurred and faded away to nothing.

Utter helplessness washed over Flack as he fruitlessly keyed the mic and tried to get a response. But Mac just lay there, unresponsive and unmoving, and with the rubble slightly obscuring his view, Flack couldn't even tell if he was breathing.


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N:** _So here it is - the last chapter with an epilogue at the end. After this I'll be returning to writing 'Perfect Shining Dark' with the occasional distracting one-shot that crops up and DEMANDS to be written!_

_Thank you all so much for reading this story and for all of you who took the time to review it, and especially all my 'regular' reviewers! :) Enjoy!  
_

* * *

**Chapter 7**

"Hey we got a path through!" one of the search and rescue guys called back.

"You're up," the crew leader said.

Riley nodded, grabbing the portable oxygen tank and making sure her pockets were stuffed with the supplies she had grabbed. Working her way through the fairly small space that had been cleared, she came out into the collapsed but slightly open area of the room where the trapped detective lay. They'd received word that he had stopped responding, and her heart sank as his clearly unconscious form came into view.

"Mac! Hey Mac, can you hear me?" she called as she crawled over to him, quickly taking in his obvious injuries.

Not a shred of a response.

She quickly felt for a pulse in his neck. It was there but thready and slow, his breathing half-hearted at best, and his skin freezing. Not that she was surprised given how cold the air temperature now was let alone that his shirt and light jacket were absolutely soaked with cold water that was pooled on the ground beneath him. Not good. Reaching her hand beneath his undershirt, she lay the back of it on his chest, feeling exactly how shallow his respirations were and how cold his core really was. Her own pant legs were now getting wet, and she shivered at the thought of him lying in that water for hours. Fishing in one of her pockets and pulling out an oxygen mask, she called back to her partner, "James! Hey, James!"

"Yeah?" came a muffled reply.

"I'm going to need all three of our blankets, all the hot packs you can find in the truck, two bags of fluid, a bottle of sterile saline and a SAM splint."

"Anything else?" James called.

She thought for a few seconds while she turned on the oxygen tank and slipped the mask over Mac's face. "No, that should be it for now." She winced mentally at his severely broken left arm, and felt for a pulse in that wrist. Nothing. But given how cold he was, she couldn't be sure if that was simply because he was so hypothermic that he had already lost nearly all peripheral blood flow, or because the fracture had cut off circulation to his hand given that his palm was facing the ceiling when it really really shouldn't have been.

Double-checking to see if he had a pulse in his right wrist, her heart both sank and rose as she found a faint one under her fingers. On the bright side that meant that his entire body hadn't gone into final survival mode yet; but it also meant that either she had missed it on his left side, or his fractured arm had indeed at some point cut off his circulation. So long as he had received at least minimal blood flow to that hand for at least half the time he'd been trapped, he'd be fine. But otherwise…she winced in sympathy at the thought of him possibly losing it. Her stomach also sank a bit at the prospect of repositioning such a bad open fracture to try to restore circulation, but it had to be done. It was probably a good thing he was unresponsive at least for now. No amount of meds that she had would counter that level of pain. But her first mission was to try to start to warm him up.

"Hey Riley, here you go!" she heard James call.

Carefully making her way back around Mac, she met James halfway and took the supplies from him.

"It'll only be another minute until I get all the way through, but it'll be about another 15 before they can get the extrication equipment back in here," James told her.

She nodded. "Thanks. I'll need another portable tank then, and if you can get one of the other rescue crews to bring more hot packs from the station that'd be perfect."

"You got it," James told her, "I'll be right back."

Cutting and pulling away as much of Mac's soaked jacket and shirt as possible, she lay a single layer of blanket over him and placed the hot packs over it on his chest and up under his arms, folding the rest of the blankets over them. Adjusting the headlamp that was on her helmet, she finally found the faintest hint of a vein in the crook of his arm, she quickly slid the IV needle in, hooking up the first bag of fluid. Having specifically kept some of the hot packs in reserve, she wrapped and taped them around the IV tubing in order to the heat up the fluid before it entered his body. She wished she could at least insulate him from more of the intrinsic cold of the air, but most of him was still buried and there was nothing further she could do to try to warm him up and at least he wouldn't get colder. She crawled back around to his left side, her stomach filling with butterflies at what she had to do next. What if she made his arm worse? But looking at it, she realized that wasn't really possible. Reaching for his wrist she re-confirmed that he indeed didn't have a pulse in that hand.

"Hey Mac? Mac? You with me yet?" she asked him, looking back up at his face and searching for any sort of response.

Still not a thing.

Rinsing the dirt off his arm, she took a deep breath and grasped his wrist with one hand and his arm right below his elbow with the other. She was going to have to apply some traction, try to straighten it and pray it worked. Adrenaline was racing through her. It wasn't so much the fact that she had never done anything like this before, but at the level of pain which she couldn't help but sympathize with even though he was unresponsive. He might not stay that way so much once she started manipulating his arm which had two inches of broken bone sticking out of it. For his sake, she hoped he did.

Holding his arm in place against her knee, she slowly pulled on his wrist. But while he hadn't given any indication he felt her start the IV, this, he clearly felt and responded to. His face tightened as a new thin line of blood traced down his arm as she straightened it and pulled against the edges of his skin where the bone had punctured through. He slowly woke up, and started instinctively to try to fight and pull away from where she continued her manipulation of his arm. Moving quickly to prevent him from injuring himself even further in his attempts to relieve what had to be excruciating pain, Riley pinned his upper left arm to the ground with her knee, holding his wrist firm and placing her other hand just below his collarbone to keep him down.

"Mac. Mac!" she called to him. "Mac! Hold still. Your arm's broken and you're going to make it worse."

Increasing but as yet incomplete understanding of his surroundings crept back into his eyes. But Riley could see that only made him more fully aware of the pain he was in, and as limited as his ability to move was, he continued to try to fight her efforts.

"James!" she called, "James, if you can get all the way through, I could kinda use your help!"

There were sounds of scuffling and her partner appeared a minute later, wriggling through the small space on his stomach. "What do you need?" he asked.

"He doesn't have a pulse in this hand, so I got to straighten his arm. I need you to hold him down."

James nodded and quickly pulled himself up. Crossing to where his partner and their patient were, he placed one knee on the man's collarbone, one hand right below his left shoulder and the other just below his elbow, pinning him to the ground. "Jesus he's strong," James muttered to Riley as the man continued to fight to pull away.

"I know," Riley said. Freed from having to hold their patient down herself, she returned her attention to the task at hand, double-checking for pulse. There still wasn't one.

"Mac! I know this hurts, but you gotta hold still," James told their struggling patient.

_The blankness was gone and all he knew was a state of being. There was something on his face and his entire world was one of blurred and indescribable pain and he just wanted it to stop…tried to do anything to make it stop despite someone pinning him in place._ _But somehow voices behind the bobbing lights calling his name filtered through enough for him to understand "_arm broken…make it worse…" _and telling him to hold still. Some distant part of his brain almost made sense of everything. But it was all fuzzy and vague and incomprehensible, and his sheer desperation to relieve the agony in his arm was too strong and overrode everything. _

_Then someone held him down even more firmly, and any small amount of cognitive function left him as his arm exploded with from the inside out with pain that crescendoed, skyrocketing past what he could comprehend. It felt as though his arm was being shredded by molten, jagged glass without any end in sight. _

Riley resolutely blocked out the man's gut-wrenching cries of pure anguish as she finished straightening his arm. She could feel the bones slide against each other as more blood traced down his arm, and she couldn't begin to imagine the pain he was in. But underneath her fingers she finally felt a faint hint of pulse return in his wrist. A sense of almost euphoric success filled her. Between the possibility of the potential irreversible loss of blood flow to his arm below the break and the fact that this was usually done in surgery, she had figured the odds of the limb getting a pulse back were slim to none. She securely wrapped the moldable foam covered splint to his arm.

_As the liquid fire and gouging knives in his arm dissipated and slowly eased to a hot, pounding throb, absolute exhaustion crashed back over him. Despite the continued pain, the stability that his badly broken arm now had for the first time was a relief that was as far beyond words in the opposite direction as the pain had been, and once again he had very little to counter slipping back into the realm of unconsciousness. The blurry figure who was by his head shook him slightly, calling to him to "_stay with me" _and to _"Stay awake!". _But it was beyond his ability, and he let the blanketing warmth of unconscious darkness slip back over him._

The further half hour that it took the tech rescue crew to get through and extricate Mac was probably the longest half hour of Riley's life as there wasn't much more she could do for the unconscious detective than watch over him and hope his condition didn't deteriorate further.

And if time dragged for the two medics, it ground to an absolute standstill for Jo and Flack who couldn't do anything.

After an eternity lasting 45 minutes had passed from when they had first made contact with Mac, the rescue crew finally appeared.

**xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx**

"Devon. Hey, Devon," Flack shook the little boy gently.

Devon blearily sat up, the fleece throw Ellie had covered him with falling off his shoulders, and rubbed the sleep from his eyes with the back of his hand. He looked at Flack who was kneeling next to the couch just below his eye level.

Behind Flack, Jo woke up Ellie who had fallen asleep in the big armchair in the living room with Devon, the DVD menu for '_The Emperor's New Groove_' still on the TV. "Hey, sweetie, you can go to bed now," Jo told her quietly.

"What time is it?" Ellie mumbled.

"6am," Jo replied.

Ellie looked over her mother's shoulder at Devon. "I didn't want to leave him out here by himself," she said.

"I know, honey," Jo said, giving her a quick kiss on her forehead.

Ellie wrinkled her nose at her mom's show of affection in front of Flack, even though he was oblivious to the exchange going on behind him. Ellie would have died before admitting it, but she had a bit of an 'older guy' crush on the detective.

"Thank you for watching him," Jo continued, "You're awesome and I owe you a pancake breakfast."

"Tomorrow at that one place we found last week?" Ellie asked hopefully.

"Done," Jo said with a small smile.

"Uncle Don?" Devon asked sleepily.

"Yeah, it's me," Flack, "How're you doing buddy?"

"Ok," Devon said in a little voice, "Where's daddy? Is daddy with you?"

Flack looked down briefly, "No, no he's not."

Devon's eyes shimmered as tears sprung to them. "Where is he?" he asked, "Is he okay? Couldn't you get him out?" His voice wobbled and Flack grabbed him into a hug before setting him back on the couch and holding both the boy's shoulders in his hands.

"No we did, kiddo," Flack told him.

"Then where is he?" Devon pressed, "How come you didn't call me?"

"Because we couldn't get him out until not all that long ago," Flack said, "And he got hurt kind of badly so he's at the hospital right now."

Mac had been rushed, still unresponsive, to Trinity General where how bad of shape he was in was made official. One of the main tendons in his forearm had been almost completely severed when his broken left arm had been rolled in the secondary collapse and it had also suffered fairly significant damage from the lack of blood supply during that time. He had multiple bruised internal organs, his pelvis and right leg were each broken in two places, and he had been in profound hypothermia. But this latter near-fatal life threat had actually probably saved his life.

As the doctor had explained it to Flack, when crushed or compressed for extended periods of time, ones muscle and surrounding tissue got damaged and destroyed and release toxins into the blood stream when the pressure on them was released. But not only had the medics on scene anticipated this and loaded Mac with IV fluid to help dilute any toxins once he was freed, because he was so cold his periphery circulation had been significantly restricted as his body had shunted blood to his core to try to keep his vital organs warm. Given how long he'd been trapped and how much of his body had been crushed that whole time, he almost certainly would have died from the toxin release if he hadn't have been so hypothermic when they had pulled him out of the building.

"Can we go see him?" Devon asked.

"Of course," Flack said, "Why do you think I'm here?"

The sheer happy relief that flooded the little boy's face melted Flack's heart.

When Flack had left the ER, Mac was awake (although somewhat in and out) and in critical but stable condition. He was going to need surgery, lots of them to be exact, but the doc had agreed it wasn't anything that couldn't wait for Flack to get Devon and the boy to see him briefly first.

"Where are your shoes?" Flack asked him.

"By the door," Devon answered.

"Go run put them on and we'll get going," Flack told him.

**xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx**

Devon clutched Flack's hand very tightly as they walked through the ER to the trauma room where Mac was. Flack had no idea if the boy remembered the last time he'd been to this same ER when Mac had found him beaten and with cigarette burns all over his lower body hiding in the back of his closet and his mother lying murdered by his father in their living room. Flack somewhat doubted that he did with any specificity, but either way, a busy city ER was an intimidating place, especially under these circumstances.

Flack knocked on the glass sliding door as he opened it and went into the room. Devon hung nervously a step behind him, gripping his hand even tighter. Mac had been sleeping but he opened his eyes and turned his head at Flack's knock.

"Don?" he asked in a somewhat groggy voice, a fair number of drugs now running through him.

"Yeah," Flack answered with smile, "How are you doing?"

Mac just nodded. "Warmer," he said.

"Good," Flack replied, "I've got someone here to see you."

Mac angled his gaze down as Devon took a couple tentative steps forwards, completely intimidated by the surroundings and the vulnerable state Mac was in.

"Daddy?" he asked in a very small voice.

Mac felt his throat catch at the sight of Devon just standing there with his hair sticking out in every sort of direction and his clothes all wrinkly from sleeping in them. He pulled his good arm from under the warming blanket. "Come here," he said.

Devon's chin wobbled as at Mac's injunction he rushed over, melting into tears and climbing on the chair that Flack pushed next to the bed so he could reach. Mac wrapped his arm around Devon's back as Devon clung like a vice to his neck.

"I…thought…you weren't…coming back," the boy sobbed in a muffled voice.

Flack's own vision swam as he watched Mac murmur words of reassurance in Devon's ear despite struggling to stay awake against the drugs running through him. If Flack was brutally honest with himself, he hadn't thought they'd be pulling Mac out of that building alive either.

**xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xx**

**Epilogue**

Multiple surgeries later (mostly to repair his severely damaged arm, but also to put rods in his leg and screw his pelvis back together) and a relatively short stint in rehab, Mac found himself back in his apartment, relegated to the couch and enjoying watching Don be the one to negotiate a minefield of strewn out lego pieces and the excruciating pain that accompanied accidentally stepping on one.

"Hey Devon, you want to know something pretty cool?" Flack said from where he emerged from behind the kitchen counter and gestured for Devon to come over.

Devon hurried over, intrigued by the secretive look on his godfather's face.

Flack put his arm around Devon's shoulders and indicated Mac. "Did you know your dad is like Wolverine?"

Devon's eyes grew big while Mac tried desperately to smother a snort and keep his face neutral. "Really?" the boy asked in awe.

"mm-hmm," Flack nodded. It hadn't taken long for him to see just how unsettled everything that happened to Mac and the continued process of his recovery had made Devon. It was a scary, tough thing for a kid to go through anyway, but Flack had expected once the whole intimidating hospital stage was done that the boy would be able to see that Mac really was going to be okay. But Devon had remained very muted and worried-seeming, and it had struck Flack: Mac was the person who literally saved the little boy's life and given him stability, a future, love and a home for the first time. For the kid to see Mac of all people first in serious shape he had been in at the hospital and even now still weeks away from simply attempting to walk had to have turned the child's world upside down and deeply scared him. Looking back, Flack had a suspicion that Mac had long ago picked up on Devon's persistent and understandable fear, being remarkably attentive in a quiet reassuring way to his adopted son as well as being more compliant with his pain meds than Flack ever remembered him being.

But clearly Devon's mind still wasn't at ease and Flack decided it was his turn to try to reassure his godson in a way he knew Mac couldn't.

"How is he like Wolverine?" Devon insisted.

"Well," said Flack, "You know how your dad's had to have all those operations?"

Devon nodded.

"They put metal in his skeleton, just like Wolverine."

Devon's eyes grew wide. "They did?" he asked in an awed tone.

"Yep," Flack replied.

"Even the spikes?"

From the couch, Mac choked as he fought to contain a sudden snort of laughter.

"Ask him," Flack said, gesturing to Mac and grinning impishly at his friend. Mac mouthed swear words back at him, and Flack grinned even broader as he turned smugly away, returning his attention to the stove and the saucepans he had on it.

"Are you really like Wolverine, daddy?" Devon asked, running over to Mac, excitement shining from his eyes. How the kid never managed to step on those damn legos Mac had no idea.

"Not quite," Mac laughed. "Wolverine could make himself better, remember? And if I could do that I wouldn't be lying on the couch not able to walk just yet, with your Uncle Don being the one trying to make some strange imitation of spaghetti over there."

"Don't let him fool you," Flack told Devon conspiratorially as he leaned his elbows on the island counter while the sauce he was cooking came to a slow boil. "He _is_ like Wolverine, and it's most certainly _not_ a strange imitation of spaghetti. In fact it's going to be the _best_ spaghetti you ever had. Want to help me put the garlic bread in the oven?"

"Yeah!" Devon said, jumping up and running over.

Flack swung the boy up so he could reach the freezer door and retrieve the garlic bread from the top shelf inside it.

"Uncle Don?" Devon asked as Flack set him back on the floor.

"Yes?"

"Can you put extra cheese on it the way daddy does?"

"Oh, daddy puts extra cheese on it does he?" Flack asked as he caught Mac's grin at Devon's request.

Devon nodded his head.

"Well I'll tell you what," Flack said kneeling down and resuming his conspiratorial tone, "We'll put extra, extra cheese on it." He winked at Devon who beamed at him, and returned Mac's smile to his friend with a gloat.

Mac simply shook his head.


End file.
